The Screening Room: “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos”

There’s joy in every squiggle of Konstantin Bronzit’s “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.” The fifteen-minute film, which is nominated for a 2016 Oscar in the animated-short category, follows two unnamed cosmonauts as they prepare for a space mission. They’re best friends who revolve in the same centrifuge, swim in neighboring lanes, and read together at night. Their happiness and exuberance is infectious. It lifts the stone-faced scientists who track their progress; it even expresses itself in their space suits, which are winsomely shaped to accommodate their slightly different heads (one is square, the other rectangular). Even as they prepare for their high-tech journey, they embody old-fashioned, noble virtues: bravery, curiosity, strength, tenderness.

Watching their adventure, I was reminded of a lot of things. I thought, of course, about the American space program—what it has meant and means now. I recalled periods of training in my own life—weeks, months, or even years when I had worked to exceed myself. And I remembered friendships and, particularly, the exciting times when friendships are forged. In its second half, the film takes a meditative, even mystical turn; when that happens, it grows mysterious, exploring feelings and experiences that are harder to name.

I e-mailed Bronzit, who lives in Russia, to ask him what the film was about. “My film is not about the space program, and it is just partly about friendship,” he wrote. “It’s about loneliness. About the very close links between people. About our inability to live in human society without exiting, sometimes, to a different area, an open space where we can really breathe deeply and freely.” The idea for the film, he continued, had come to him in a dream, in the form of an image. That image “exists in my film almost in the very middle exactly, as it was in my dream.” He wouldn’t say which image it was.

At the core of Bronzit’s film is a contradiction. On the one hand, it revels in the intimacies of friendship; on the other, it’s about a solitary journey into the void. We want, and maybe need, both these things to be happy. I’ve watched “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos” again and again, trying to find the one image that expresses that contradiction. I recommend you watch it that way, too.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.